My Choice, My Happiness: My Quality World

       What’s your “quality world?” I know that’s a strange question to ask, because most people don’t really understand what “quality world” really means. This term was coined by Dr. William Glasser, a psychiatrist who believes that we all have an idea of what we really want in life. According to this author, “quality world” is the overall understanding of everything that is important to us (e.g., possessions, principles and beliefs, experiences, and relationships) in our lives. This is so ingrained in us that we often don’t even have the words to explain them. It is also all-encompassing, and cuts across all situations that we encounter. We just know what it is, and may take some time and effort to articulate it. We constantly compare this innate understanding of what we want with the reality of our lives, and strive towards making them more consistent with each other.

       In my April 30, 2010 post on this blog entitled “Of Basic Needs and Inner Harmony,” I wrote about the 5 basic needs that we have. In fact, Dr. Glasser was the one who identified these 5 basic needs as well. They are often the source of our yearnings and hopes, the origins of our “quality world.” These needs are as follows: survival; love and belonging; power; freedom; and fun. Once we understand the nature of our needs, we can then act upon them directly, and avoid letting the surface level distractions get in the way.

     As we strive towards making our “quality world” a reality, we sometimes find ourselves going around in circles. On occasion, we also hit the wall and have nowhere to turn. We feel frustrated, and don’t know where to go. What alternatives do we have then?

     When Dr. Glasser put his ideas together into a neat package, he decided to call it “Choice Theory.” There is a reason for this. He believes that our behaviors are often influenced by four components, which include: acting, thinking, feeling, and physiology. These four influence and affect each other; in fact, they are often intertwined. Our feelings and physiology are harder to change consciously, as they are part of the given in a situation. However, there is much that we can do about what we are thinking and what we are doing. As these four components are all intertwined, changing what we do and how we think will certainly affect the way we feel and how our body is responding to the situation. Therein is our choice in the matter of our state of being at any given point in time.

     Choice theory tells us that we have a choice on how to feel, think, and behave in any given situation. We only need to understand our basic needs and how these are reflected in our “quality world.” We can then steer ourselves towards thoughts and behaviors that would be consistent to getting our needs met and coming closer to our “quality world.” Easier said than done; but this goal is ultimately attainable.

     In the morning of April 9, 2011 (Saturday), Sr. Liz Tham, a certified Senior Faculty member of the William Glasser Institute (USA) will be elucidating the concepts of Choice Theory and achieving one’s “Quality World” in a seminar-workshop entitled “Quality Relationships: The Key to Success and Satisfaction.” The speaker will address the challenges faced by parents, teachers and just about anybody when dealing with others. If you or anyone you know are interested to participate, please call PsychConsult, Inc. at (02)4212469, (02)3576427, or (0917)8080193 for details and reservations. You can also email psychconsult@gmail.com. Do call as there are limited seats for this event.

Test Anxiety

            For many of our students, exam week is happening or is just around the corner.  It is a culmination of a hectic school year or semester, for both students and teachers alike.  One often overlooked phenomenon, however, is the anxiety that a few students experience during the time of examinations.  It is a particular kind of anxiety that has been given a specific name, which is test anxiety. 

            The following are common signs of test anxiety: 

·         Feeling nervous before, during, and after a test, which often have physical manifestations (e.g., clammy hands, “butterflies” in the stomach, tense and aching muscles, headaches, rapid heart rate, etc.);

·         Worrying about the test for days on end, often causing the person to lose sleep and concentration;

·         Having too many thoughts about how bad one will perform, making one become overwhelmed and confused;

·         Being vulnerable to one’s reactions and feelings, such that one is easily upset and disturbed (e.g, crying spells, irritability, uneasiness); and 

·         Test performance is severely affected, despite good efforts at preparation. 

Of course, some anxiety and worrying is actually a very typical reaction to a stressor, such as an exam.  Many people experience this most natural of reactions and can be helped with simple techniques, such as the following: 

·         Simple relaxation and breathing exercises (see my post on this blog dated 13 March 2010) can help immediately lower one’s anxiety;

·         Changing the way one thinks about the situation, and shifting to a more realistic way of thinking (see my posts on this blog dated 10 August 2010 & 24 September 2010) can help with the worries;

·         Knowing more about the test conditions (e.g., the testing room, the proctor, etc.) can help ease added worries related to the test situation;

·         Minding the basics of eating right, sleeping enough, and exercising can help lower stress reactions (see my post on this blog dated 01 October 2010); and

·         Preparing the best that one can, given one’s time and resources, for the test is also a good reassurance that one will at least do good enough. 

If you find yourself suffering severe and unrelenting worries and anxieties despite the tips discussed here, you may need to consider seeking professional help.  The professionals who are trained to deal with such issues are clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.  Having a professional help you with these difficulties can prove to be most rewarding.  

KVA Learning Styles

There have been many theories proposed to explain how people learn, but few surpass the popularity of what is commonly referred to as the KVA styles.  KVA stands for the three modalities that people use to access and make sense of external information, namely, kinesthetic-tactile, visual and auditory.  The general idea is that people are better able to understand new information when it is conveyed through one’s preferred modality.   Proponents of this idea believe that the learner is able to maximize learning when information is conveyed using the appropriate modalities. 

Kinesthetic or tactile learners like to learn by first-hand experience.  They like to manipulate, touch, move, and feel the reality of what they are learning.  We can see this in very young children who like playing with water.  They like to see what water can do and the limits of the medium.  These learners like to explore their environments, run experiments, and engage in hands-on activities. 

Visual learners think in pictures.  They like images and manipulating these pictures in their minds.  In the typical classroom, visual aids often capture the attention of these students.  When helping these learners, they often have an easier time understanding complex information that are visually represented in time lines, diagrams, charts, pictures, and the like.  They can also be engaged in imagining how a particular scene could look like to them. 

The typical classroom often caters to auditory learning.  This is the usual classroom where a teacher talks about the lesson and illustrates using verbal explanations.  They also remember and make sense of information better when they repeat the words and talk aloud to themselves. 

The KVA learning styles approach also presumes that we prefer to use one of the three modalities over the other two.  As such, our preferences can easily be summarized by rearranging the three letters.  For example, someone who is first auditory and then visual would have the AVK style; another person who is more kinesthetic-tactile before visual and auditory will have the KAV style, and so forth.  You may want to take a look at a free material I found that includes an informal assessment and explanation of one’s KVA learning style (see http://epc.ucsc.edu/UserFiles/File/Peer%20Mentor%20-%20Learning%20Styles.pdf). 

Learning about our own learning styles can be helpful, as this guides us to maximize our learning by engaging in activities and methods that allow us to use the modalities through which we learn best.  Although this has its most direct application to those who are in the teaching profession and parents who tutor their children, we can also use this knowledge to get our message across to others more effectively by exploring ways of delivery using all three modalities. 

Basic Feelings

Have you ever listened to yourself talk to others when you are relating a certain experience that affected you?  In narrating your story, do you hear what kind of feeling words you use?  In many of our conversations, feelings are an implicit part of our message, meaning that we don’t necessarily say our feeling but only imply it by means of our tone of voice and nonverbal expressions (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, etc.).  Whereas most of the people we talk to will be able to pick up on the emotional tone of our message, many of us do not explicitly state how we feel or felt. 

Being able to express our feelings and giving them specific names can have several benefits.  For one, naming our reaction to a particular experience or event enables us to put meaning into this part of our lives.  This meaning often results to a greater understanding of ourselves and the way we see ourselves reacting to external circumstances.  For another, being able to identify an emotional reaction can lead us to specify a detail in our experience that held particular significance for us.  This makes us gain an understanding of when and what really made us react the way we did.  Finally, admitting our reaction can help us decide how we are going to react to the specific circumstances that we are experiencing.  This step is often the difference between merely reacting to one’s situation and purposively expressing one’s emotions. 

In order for us to be able to express our feelings adequately, we need to build our vocabulary for feeling words.  Researchers studying emotions believe that there are only a handful of basic feelings that are universally experienced.  This means that the feelings that people experience anywhere in the world are only made up of a few basic elements.  Other emotional reactions are said to be combinations of these basic feelings.  Much of what we know in this area is a product of research done by psychologists Paul Eckman, Nico Frijda, and their colleagues.  Some of the basic feelings that have been included in these lists are as follows:  happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, shame and desire. 

For most of us Filipinos who are bilingual, we need to understand the various feeling words that different languages we know are able to convey.  Many of us will be convinced that that certain words in a particular language can better convey our meaning and experience.  We also need to be sensitive to these personal preferences. 

We can thus begin our journey of better emotional awareness by familiarizing ourselves with these fundamental emotional experiences.  We can ask ourselves how and when do we have these reactions?  To what extent are we able to anticipate and manage them?  What is easiest for us to identify and what are the most difficult to manage?  We can then observe ourselves incorporate these words the next time we are talking about our experiences to others.